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I’ve just released a new reader’s theater play script. I put it together early in the summer but have waited until now to release it because, like nearly all my plays, I wanted to try it out with my own students before offering it to you. By doing so, not only do I catch (nearly) all my typos, I’m also able to figure out which lines work and which lines need a bit more pep. It amazes me how adding an innocuous word such as “always” bolsters an otherwise flat one-liner (in this case, spoken by an elephant to a hippo).

“How the Elephant Got Its Trunk” is my new play. It’s based on Rudyard Kipling’s oft-adapted “Elephant’s Child” from his 1902 work, Just So Stories. Yes, there are a lot of adaptions of this one out there, but I think you’ll find mine to be unique. First of all, Kipling’s original story is about an elephant that get’s spanked by all his relatives. I’m not intending to make any political statements, but there’s little question these days that spanking isn’t considered school-appropriate. Consequently, I’ve come up with a clever way to re-work the story without altering its mojo. It’s a Just So adaption just right for class!

My script also encourages students to experiment with dialect. I’ve found that any time I can get kids talking like a southern belle, a Bronx street urchin, or a Russian cowpoke (see my Talk Like A Russian Day post), the stories come to life in profound ways. We also have a lot more laughs. “Elephant’s Child” sets the tone with Swahili storytellers, then tosses in a baboon with a British accent, a snake with a lisp, a hip-hop jivin’ giraffe, and others. If your kids like it as much as my students do, I think you’ll be pleased.

I’ve also included two versions in one package: my original, which is geared toward 5th through 8th graders, and a simplified “Youngers Version” for 3rd through 5th. My fifth graders are using the upper version and doing fine with it. It includes leveled comprehension activities based on Common Core standards. Older students can pair the play with the original short story–available all over the Web. You can also enact it alongside another of my Kipling plays, “Rikki Tikki Tavi,” which is available through Scholastic.

Okay, that’s not a squirrel. It’s a mongoose, as in Rikki Tikki Tavi of Jungle Book fame. My students are all jazzed about the play Rikki Tikki Tavi, which they just recorded for use as a podcast. If you’re a fan of using Read Aloud Plays but haven’t yet experimented with podcasting, I encourage you to give it a try. Hear our sample by clicking on the mongoose, or better yet, read on for two minutes and find out how easy it is for you and your students to make your own.

Using Read Aloud Plays in the classroom has numerous academic benefits. One, the Common Core State Standards put a great deal of emphasis on using drama to teach reading. In fact, the word drama appears 47 times in the standards. Two, kids love reading and enacting plays, meaning their engagement is heightened. Three, plays rapidly improve fluency. Using Read Aloud Plays accomplishes this because most students are willing to read and re-read the same script repetitively (the same way they probably read picture books when they were tots). One additional key to success, I think, is to offer authentic and varying ways to present your plays.

Don’t get me wrong. Divvying up parts and reading a play just once has its merits. In fact, my class will be doing just that for President’s Day. Using three plays from my book, Read Aloud Plays: Symbols of America, we’ll be touching on the significance of the holiday without devoting an excess of class time. But in this case the emphasis is on teaching a specific history lesson rather than improving reading skills.

To really build fluency (and comprehension), I want my kids working with a given script for three to four weeks. They meet with me in “play groups” for “cast table readings” three times over the first week. Each play group is about a third of the class. Once they’ve demonstrated command of their given script, we move on to rehearsals. After two or three weeks of rehearsing (roughly three times a week for 20 minutes a pop), we present our plays in a few basic ways: Simple classroom staging, school stage production, full-blown musical, movie making, or podcasting.

Podcasting may initially seem daunting, but will become fairly simple with a bit of practice. You’ll need a laptop pre-loaded with Audacity software (a free download), a decent omnidirectional mic such as Samson’s Go Mic, and a quiet room. Students simply read their lines. You can stop between each scene, re-do scenes as necessary, edit out some of the stumbles, stutters, and pauses, and even alter the pitch. Editing may consume a couple hours of your weekend, but once you’ve done so you can export your play as an mp3 file. Share it with you class as you would any other digital sound clip. In my classroom, we post them on our webpage.

Visit my classroom website at dailyplatypus.com to see and hear samples of podcasts, play productions, and our Christmas Carol movie. If you’re working on plays for African-American History Month, it’s not too late to record your students for all posterity via a podcast. Maybe it isn’t so easy a squirrel can do it, but you can!